On Amazon kindle, available for pre-order! West Toward the Sunset
It’s aimed at the teen and tween audience, and perhaps might be the first of a series, following the Kettering family and their friends. The print version will be available around Christmas, in a week and a bit. Cover courtesy of Cover Girls, who did my last two book covers. I love that the boy Jon looks just like my little brother did, when he was a kidlet.
There was a YA novel that my mother had a cherished copy of – likely a first edition, because I vividly remember the dust jacket painting in the 1930s commercial style – a pair of teenagers on horseback, in a landscape that was very clearly California’s back country. There was a gnarled live oak tree behind them, some ranges of green trees that looked like a citrus orchard, and a range of purple mountains on the horizon. Mom had her own bookplate pasted into the inside cover of that copy – a black and white picture of a cowboy on a horse, swinging a lariat. That book gravitated from Granny Jessie’s house through three or four houses where we all lived, until it finally was destroyed in the 2003 Paradise Mountain fire, which burned Mom and Dad’s retirement home to the ground, along with just about all the inherited memorabilia and books from both sides of the family. I had a go at replacing some of the books which had been lost, but I was stymied for years at remembering the name and author. And things happened: Dad passed away in 2010, and Mom fell catastrophically some years after that. She has been paralyzed from the shoulders down ever since. She had to go to a nursing home, and then to my sister’s home. The retirement house had to be sold, all the furniture and fittings dispersed among the family, sold at an estate sale or given away … which is irrelevant to this essay, but for the fact that that book was the one which I never got around to replacing.
I couldn’t remember the title of that book, or the author, although I could remember such things as the name of the protagonist, his friends, the general plot, and the fact that there was a map of the relevant area in the book. His name was Billy, his cousin from the big city was Penny, his horse was named Querida, and the family name was Deane – they lived on a ranch in the back country of Northern San Diego County, as it was then. He had a good friend in a boy from the local Indian reservation, and the plot involved dangerous smuggling from over the border, and an earth tremor which had somehow rerouted the natural springs which watered the Deane ranch. Such is my erratic memory – one which Mom once compared to an untidy filing cabinet, full of curious odds, ends and strange but true facts, but all jumbled together in no particular organized order. Now and again, I tried out a search using these bare factoids, but nothing ever turned up, until I threw out the question to the regulars at the Sunday morning book thread at Ace of Spades HQ – and yay – a miracle!
A regular reader there applied those various sketchy details out to a better search engine and came up with the title and author name! Hurrah! The book was titled The Singing Cave, by one Margaret Leighton Carver, who apparently had a good long run as a writer of young adult historical fiction and biographies for about twenty years. The Singing Cave, originally released in 1945 was one of her first popular novels. She lived in California, which accounted for the local west-coast color. I found a reasonably-priced copy at Abe Books and ordered it at once. Not only was there a certain sentimental value for me – but that in many ways the plot and setting was in a California long-gone, and even fading in memory as those who recall it as children and teenagers in the 1930s and 40ies pass from this mortal coil. There once was a California of ranches and small farms, orchards of citrus trees surrounded by windbreaks of eucalyptus, olive trees and grapes for raisins and wine, dairy farms, plantations of olive trees, almonds and other specialty crops, interspersed with small towns of comfortable early 20th century houses, modest suburbs and the occasional grand estate in Pasadena, Santa Barbera, or San Marino, established by a scattering of old wealth who loved the mild climate. I was around to see the last few bits of pre-WWII California, which my parents remembered from their own growing up, before it was all swamped in miles and miles of development sprawl and strangled by new freeways. The California that my parents knew and loved, and that I remember most fondly is all but gone – the world described in The Singing Cave is saved from the wreck like a bit of flotsam, a window into a previous time, and a reflection of the way that things used to be.
So, another busy week at Chez Hayes – some work for a client, and all but the finishing touches on the WIP, the YA pioneer adventure story, with the working title of West Towards the Sunset. I might make it into a series, in the spirit of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I loved that series, as a young reader, myself. Not all that fond of the TV series version, which spun radically away from the books in ways large and small. My everlasting conviction has been that historical fiction is a gateway drug into an interest in actual history. I think that more people initially became interested in the American Civil War through reading Gone With the Wind, or in the American Revolution through Johnny Tremain, or any number of other riveting narratives set in other historical periods … so why not throw my own books into the grand mix? My personal motto was always that of the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, an enterprise in which I served with only moderate personal success. (Hey, I got a pension out of it, so, whatever…)
The motto was “To Inform and Entertain” – so it’s my hope that my own books inform and entertain, and perhaps inspire a life-enhancing further interest.
Anyway, West Towards the Sunset is all but done – just a few hundred words to the afterward/postscript, and out to the volunteer beta readers in the next day or so.
In the meantime – coping with a neighborhood concern. A close Aged Neighbor of advanced years and uncertain health passed away in hospital a week ago Friday. We were close – close enough that my daughter was on her Life Alert roster, and we had the names of her next of kin and their phone numbers (most of whom lived several states away.) We regularly walked her dog, Penny the Labradoodle, and had walked with her, when she was in better condition, so frequently that a couple of other neighbors thought that she was my mother. We found a kitten for her, a full sister to Miso, among the collection on the other side of the neighborhood, a fluffy white kitten which she named Snowy, who grew up to be affectionate and spectacularly dog-like, for a cat.
Then Penny the Labradoodle at 15 years old and arthritic, became reluctant to walk more than half a block. Aged Neighbor fell a couple of times and went no farther than the group mailbox – propped on a walker, to the covert relief of us all. Then she crunched her car fender, and gave up the keys to the car to another neighbor … Anyway – a handful of us in the nearby houses were very fond of Aged Neighbor and kept a careful eye on her.
Aged Neighbor’s family are all touchingly grateful to all of us for having seen to her care and wellbeing. Snowy has been adopted by one neighbor. Another neighbor has a friend who may eventually adopt Penny the Labradoodle. Aged Neighbor’s family all gathered this week to sort out the house. They have no need of her household things, clothes, furniture, objects d’arte and monumental brand-new new cat tree, as they drove from out of state and have full households of their own anyway. We’ve been given a good share of them – including the cat tree! – either to use for the Daughter Unit’s eventual home, or to pass on to Goodwill. The remainder have been given to other friends and neighbors. That took up the rest of our time this weekend.
And that was my week – yours?
So, I am an aficionado of a certain kind of YouTube series – of ambitious DIYers who most usually have either mad professional building skills, or a generous income (most often both), plus absolutely insane levels of optimism, who take on a decrepit bit of housing, or at least something with all or most of a roof on it. Over a number of years or months, these skilled, and hopeful masochists take on an abandoned or derelict rural property – a tumbledown pig farm in Belgium, a decayed village house or farmstead in Portugal, a ruinous French chateau, a French village hoarder house with half the roof fallen in, or a burned-out country cottage in Sweden. Usually at least half the time-lapsed video is of tearing out the decayed bits, and sometimes the finished result is painfully ultra-modern interior and looks like one of the display rooms in an Ikea outlet … but if the owners are happy in it, who am I to quibble over their tastes in interior decoration.
Some of these spaces are very far gone – the Swedish cottage was burned out in a fire, and the Portuguese farm complex is such a tottering wreck that the best that the young couple can do with the remains is salvage the cut stone that it all was built from and use the stone to sheath new conblock walls of a construction in the original footprint. But I think this week, I have found the most thoroughly wrecked historic structure available in any real estate market – this first through a feature in the English Daily Mail newspaper. For some reason their newshounds lighted on a mid-19th century house in Frankfort, Maine – a mansard-roof mansion at the crossroads of a hiccup of a town, and one which is so visibly wrecked that even the most optimistic real estate listings can’t even begin to hide the decay. When the listing warns you to wear safety shoes and bring a flashlight … and there aren’t even any pictures in the listing of the interior … yeah, this place is a real estate disaster.
If it were built of stone or brick, there might be hope for a renovator – but if it is all wood, the roof has leaked for decades, with wood-rot and black mold throughout all three stories and not a shred of anything resembling preventative maintenance … no; as my daughter the real estate agent says cheerfully – nothing wrong with it that a couple of gallons of gas and a book of matches couldn’t fix. We had a friend in South Ogden, when I was stationed at Hill AFB, who were trying their best to renovate an 1895 Italianate brick three-story on 5th Street. It had been the wife’s childhood home, and she had a sentimental attachment to the place. It eventually turned out that there was nothing much of good quality about the structure, save for perhaps the thick and solid brick exterior shell. If they knew at the beginning of the project what they knew by the end, they would have gutted the shell and built anew, bottom to top. She wound up hating the place – and was inexpressibly happy when they purchased and moved into a well-preserved 1920s Craftsman-era bungalow several blocks distant. In reality, I suspect that many hopeful renovators share that discouraging experience.
The mansard historical wreck in Frankfort comes with an acre, which looks like woodland. Probably, the only workable solution is for a purchaser to salvage every shred of usable elements surviving decades of neglect, demolish the wreck – and build an exact replica incorporating those elements on a new site a bit farther back from a well-trafficked local road.
Well, I will be keeping track of the mansard wreck in Frankfort – it might very well turn up someday, as the focus of a madly optimistic, skilled and well-financed YouTube enthusiast. And I wish them the best of luck.
They’ll need it.
The matter of a certain literary style and practice came up a couple of months ago – and I was reminded again of the discussion in a weird way, when my daughter and I watched the Night at the Museum movie series. This was in the interests of not freaking out Wee Jamie terribly, who is soaking up information and stimuli like a small, child-shaped sponge. I vaguely recall watching the first of the series, but my daughter did not, so I must have seen it in a theater, possibly when the Gentleman With Whom I (Once) Kept Company was on one of his yearly visits to Texas. Cute movie, and one which loaded in a lot of established actors in supporting roles (Ricky Gervais? Seriously?) …but anyway. (It is kind of cool, though – imagining an animated dinosaur skeleton playing ‘fetch’ the bone, and behaving like a playful puppy…)
The museum of the initial movie setting reminded me of an elementary school field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park, which also covered the La Brea Tar Pits, with all the life-sized landscaped dioramas, and the stuffed critters, mounted dinosaur bones and the remains of paleolithic critters excavated from the tar pits… all terribly retro and rather quaint, actually. There’s a natural history museum here in the old upscale part of San Antonio, the Witte Museum, with pretty much the same sort of exhibits, established around the same period, now with the addition of lighting and sound effects.
In any event, I began to think on how these kinds of exhibits became so very popular in the 19th century: I mean, the showman P. T. Barnum started with his exhibit of natural curiosities, scientific exhibits, wonders, and marvels early on. People flocked to see them in the flesh, and twice natural size – because most ordinary people didn’t often see extraordinary things; dinosaur bones, ancient Eqyptian temples, statues of Greek gods and goddesses, African elephants … such were curiosities, and rare ones at that. So going to P. T. Barnum’s flamboyant exhibits, and later on to more staid and scholarly local museums of natural history – well, there they were; all the exotic natural history and fabled creatures that you could wish to see, before movies and television brought them to us in living color in theater and living room.
On one of the book/author blogs which I follow (can’t recall which one or when, or even if it is an original insight!) another writer made what I realized immediately was a perceptive observation, regarding those verbally florid Victorian novelists who went on for pages and pages, describing scenes, settings and characters. Modern readers find this terribly frustrating, as this tendency bogs down the plot something awful. The reason Victorian authors did so was because most of their readers then had no mental archive of visual references to build on! When someone like Sir Walter Scott wrote about medieval Perth, or Dumas wrote about Renaissance France, or Lew Wallace about the Roman-era Holy Land, they were setting the necessary scene for readers in necessary and exacting detail for a reader who perhaps might at best have seen a crude black and white line drawing, or a hand-colored lithograph of a castle, Jerusalem, or the skyline of Paris. There was nothing in the 19th century reader’s visual vocabulary anything like what movies, television, even color photographs in glossy coffee-table books provide modern readers. We have the advantage of already having those visuals in mind, and don’t need to have them spelled out at length.
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